John Lothrop Motley. a memoir — Volume 1 eBook

young man who sees his lofty ideals confronted with
the ignoble facts which strew the highways of political
life. But we can recognize real conviction and
the deepest feeling beneath his scornful rhetoric and
his bitter laugh. He was no more a mere dilettante
than Swift himself, but now and then in the midst
of his most serious thought some absurd or grotesque
image will obtrude itself, and one is reminded of the
lines on the monument of Gay rather than of the fierce
epitaph of the Dean of Saint Patrick’s.

VII.

Mr. Motley’s first serious effort in historical
composition was an article of fifty pages in “The
North American Review” for October, 1845.
This was nominally a notice of two works, one on Russia,
the other “A Memoir of the Life of Peter the
Great.” It is, however, a narrative rather
than a criticism, a rapid, continuous, brilliant, almost
dramatic narrative. If there had been any question
as to whether the young novelist who had missed his
first mark had in him the elements which might give
him success as an author, this essay would have settled
the question. It shows throughout that the writer
has made a thorough study of his subject, but it is
written with an easy and abundant, yet scholarly freedom,
not as if he were surrounded by his authorities and
picking out his material piece by piece, but rather
as if it were the overflow of long-pursued and well-remembered
studies recalled without effort and poured forth almost
as a recreation.

As he betrayed or revealed his personality in his
first novel, so in this first effort in another department
of literature he showed in epitome his qualities as
a historian and a biographer. The hero of his
narrative makes his entrance at once in his character
as the shipwright of Saardam, on the occasion of a
visit of the great Duke of Marlborough. The
portrait instantly arrests attention. His ideal
personages had been drawn in such a sketchy way, they
presented so many imperfectly harmonized features,
that they never became real, with the exception, of
course, of the story-teller himself. But the
vigor with which the presentment of the imperial ship-carpenter,
the sturdy, savage, eager, fiery Peter, was given
in the few opening sentences, showed the movement
of the hand, the glow of the color, that were in due
time to display on a broader canvas the full-length
portraits of William the Silent and of John of Barneveld.
The style of the whole article is rich, fluent, picturesque,
with light touches of humor here and there, and perhaps
a trace or two of youthful jauntiness, not quite as
yet outgrown. His illustrative poetical quotations
are mostly from Shakespeare,—­from Milton
and Byron also in a passage or two,—­and
now and then one is reminded that he is not unfamiliar
with Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus”
and the “French Revolution” of the same
unmistakable writer, more perhaps by the way in which
phrases borrowed from other authorities are set in
the text than by any more important evidence of unconscious
imitation.